Whether it be glass makers or mosaicists, there’s no denying that we’ve had crafters in the magazine before. Nonetheless, this is the first edition where every single one of the main artists, whether they’ve created bespoke furniture, carved spoons, woven together wiring, stitched together rugs or moulded together ceramic pieces, has been a different kind of craft-maker. It only seems fitting therefore to explore in this issue’s artworks from history section the oldest craft of all – pottery.
It may not look like much now, but that bit of cracked pottery there, found in 2011 in a cave in southern China, is estimated by archaeologists to be around 20,000 years old. What’s so significant about its age, moreover, is that for so many years it was believed by historians that the birth of pottery coincided with the introduction of farming. After all, pottery might only be made with clay, which for the most part is in abundance, but to make it solid and durable then this clay needs to be heated at very high temperatures, such as anywhere between 600 – 1600 degrees Celsius. To achieve such unnatural heat, it was thought that people would need to have developed organised societies that could develop a food surplus in order to feed the likes of pottery makers. It made sense therefore that with the onset of farming around 10,000 – 14,000 years ago, so too did pottery evolve. This relatively new discovery however blew such theories out of the water.
Suddenly we now begin to see why context is so important when it comes to artistic pieces and understanding what we see in general. For whilst this piece may be unaesthetically pleasing nowadays, it in fact provides us with a wealth of information with which to comprehend the past, particularly when it comes to considering how our ancestors lived. On this note, it’s clear that technological innovations were occurring even before we humans made the jump from being hunter-gatherers to farmers on a scale that hadn’t been thought possible. What’s more is how such leaps in technology can directly impact upon our daily lives. Think of how much difference a pot could make to the likes of a hunter-gatherer, who until now you might have purely thought of as someone who merely roamed, hunted and foraged on the land with a spear in hand. With the use of pottery however, these people can now carry drinking water, have pots to cook in and a material with which to build better houses and object holders. Though, as well as being a practical tool, some pottery was also beginning to be viewed as something that was chiefly decorative.
Perhaps the most well-known for it’s intricately crafted and ornately decorated pottery was eighteenth century China, where many highly furnished pieces were made for the emperors. One of which can be seen here on the left, that was formulated during the Qing Dynasty sometime between 1736 and 1795. Decorated with enamel and gold, this piece reveals to us a raised up nature scene, one that depicts clouds, birds, rivers and bridges. Yet what is significant about this particular piece here however, is that it is the most expensive bit of pottery to ever have been sold, selling for a staggering $43.56 million dollars in 2021. Interestingly however, whilst it is an obscene amount for a piece of material, there is actually a wider reason for the price being so high.
For centuries, China was the world’s largest economy by far and aside from the Mongols way back in the thirteenth century, it was a land that had never been conquered. By the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries however, ultra-conservative views along with a number of serious internal wars, meant that China remained as a rather medieval society, something which made them vulnerable to the power hungry empires of Europe and later Japan. When the Chinese government banned the importation of opium to try and combat the drug epidemic that was sweeping the country in the nineteenth century for instance, the British, making so much money out of the sale of opium, actually declared war on China and bombed Beijing until it agreed to sell opium again – which it did, along with also handing over Hong Kong. The Japanese too, from 1937 until 1945, conducted a bloody campaign in China, exploiting both its resources and its people in order to compensate for the lack of what they had in their own country. In fact, so ruthless was Japan’s campaign that during what is now known as the ‘rape of Nanjing’, perhaps as many as 300,000 Chinese civilians were murdered with a further 20,000 - 80,000 women and children being tortured and raped.
Since then, China has been keen, quite understandably perhaps, to never again allow foreign powers to quite so easily march into its country and bend it at will. Though, whilst it’s also keen on building up a defence, many Chinese people are also, like many ex European colonies, keen to reclaim what was lost, such as that of their expensive pottery. The piece we can see here for example, was owned by a British family who bought it in 1875 until it was purposely bought by Chinese business moguls again in the late 1990s. Why however, is pottery in particular so important when it comes to the restoring national pride?
Historian Margaret Conrad once said that history is important because it ‘anchors us to the earth’. When we think to ourselves why we might belong to a particular place, community or country, then we tend to observe the history of the place and desperately try to find out how that might then relate to us. In fact, so embedded is this urge that early medieval Kings and Barons, often used to make up that their ancestors had always lived on the land they claimed. King Arthur for instance, was the King of the Britons not the Saxons – but that still didn’t stop the Anglo-Saxon Kings later claiming Arthur to be their own. Of course, the Chinese pottery was actually made in China, but the principle here remains the same – as regardless of whether it is a piece of material, instead of a person or a place, it is something which reaffirms to the Chinese people a sense of belonging to the place where they were born.
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